An X-ray medical diagnostic method such as mammography is a low-dose procedure that creates one or more images of a part of a patient such as a breast thereof, which is to be examined, e.g. for detection of early stages of cancer.
The mammography diagnostic procedure generally includes obtaining two images of each of the patient's breasts, one from above and one from the side. A physician or radiologist then reviews the images of the breast, i.e., mammograms, to identify any breast cancer.
While this procedure is one of the best methods of detecting early forms of breast cancer, it is still possible for the detection of breast cancer to be missed by a physician or radiologist reviewing the mammograms. For example, breast cancer may be missed by being obscured by radiographically dense, fibroglandular breast tissue.
Coherent scatter imaging has been studied in an effort to detect early forms of breast cancer, see e.g. Coherent Scatter Computed Tomography—A Novel Medical Imaging technique, J.-P. Schlomka, A. Harding, U. van Stevendaal, M. Grass, and G. Harding, Medical Imaging 2003: Physics of Medical Imaging, M. J. Yaffe and L. E. Antonuk, Editors, Proceedings of SPIE, Vol. 5030, 2003, p. 256.
The method is derived from ART methods described in the literature and is based on a back-projection step using data from measurement of the angular spread distribution of photons as scattered from an illuminated slice within the object to be examined.